How Gopbn CEO Udit Goenka grew Gopbn to $840K revenue and 3K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is he is uh based out of india and is a self-taught entrepreneur who started the online marketing journey at the age of 17. coming from a business family entrepreneurship was rooted in his blood and at the age of 18 he launched his first wordpress security plug-in that did six figures after which he launched power-up hosting in 2012 which is now an isp and a seven-figure business during his journey as ceo he's a sole growth hacker marketer and the company responsible for all customers he's got his name got popular in the seo industry as the bpn guy uh which led him to launch go be a ppn the very first kind in its space and there's over 70 grand per month in revenue right now so we're gonna dive in today are you ready to take us to the top yeah for sure i'm very excited good so what exactly is doing seventy thousand dollars per month in revenue okay so it comes from uh two different vertices of our business one is where we are providing the link building services uh for for building up those pbns and the second comes from the hosting aspects because uh the pbn hosting involves a very different kind of unique hosting which is spread across like different uh which is connected to different parts of the world okay so what's the url of the company doing the majority of the 70 grand in revenue that's uh gopbn.com gopbn.com okay very good so this is doing how much is it doing is it doing the full 70 000 yeah it's currently doing 70 70k per month right now and it's been growing at approximately around like 10 percent mrr on monthly basis okay so walk me through some other metrics here how many customers are you serving today so currently we have approximately around 3 000 customers with us we have a 4500 registered customers approximately out of which three thousand are paying customers okay so sorry three thousand are paying yeah three thousand are paying customers four thousand five hundred are registered customers with us as of now copied and if you're doing 70 grand a month from 3000 customers they're each paying you about 23 24 bucks a month yeah i promise you can say because uh when it comes to link building some of the customers are quite big so if you average out it comes down to approximately around like 24 what's your largest customer pay you per month so one of our largest customers right now he's paying approximately around eight eight grand a month to us oh wow so almost more than ten percent of your revenue yeah exactly okay very good and what about churn what's your turn today uh we have a turn rate of approximately around 1.2 percent uh per month that's gross logo churn per month yeah okay and then so keep keep going for the economics here what do you assume lifetime value is uh the lifetime value of our customer what we assume uh based on our metrics comes down to approximately around uh for 450 dollars to 500 approximately and walk me through how you're getting that number okay so so what we do is usually we multiply uh the revenue that we are getting into 24 24 times uh the month uh because what we have seen is since we have such a low turn rate and the pbn is such a business where people need it all the time because the moment you get your website it's basically hosting another website which you term it as a pbn so you do not cancel any of those hosting because the moment you do that it affects your ranking right away yeah and that is one of the reasons why we don't get any uh can we don't get that many cancellations and even the customers whoever who cancels with us they always come back after like a couple of months because they they end up rebuilding their websites so it takes them approximately around like two months to rebuild everything and get back into the business got it so you're taking 23 bucks a month times 24 months that gives you your your ltv in dollars yeah walk me through kind of growth rate so you're at 70 grand per month today where were you 12 months ago in june of 2017 so we launched our application last year in april yeah and it was under development for almost a year and a half until then uh so that so it's it's everything has happened in a matter of like a year so you had no revenue a year ago yeah not with goblin because it was a brand new project that we were working on got it how did you get 3000 customers so fast then okay so one of our biggest strengths is seo uh facebook ads and the growth hacking itself and since i had been working as an agency as well i've been helping out a lot of other customers as well so we know that in like gritty and at the same time i have i hold a good uh the other the first company power up hosting has approximately around 11 000 customers right now so out of those 11 000 customers approximately around 6500 customers are already seo customers that we have so it wasn't too difficult for us to go out and reach out to the market apart from that like i said it's it's very uh we went very aggressive with with facebook ads and seo which got us a lot of customers okay so that ties us back into cac what are you paying to acquire a customer uh approximately around or for for fbi's right now uh we are paying two dollars uh to acquire one customers okay that sounds too good to be true because they're then paying 20 bucks a month i can i can always show the screenshots to prove that well i mean is this on though a very targeted market over like 10 people or can you spend a billion dollars in that channel no you cannot spend a billion a billion dollar because there is only like uh since it's it's a pb and pbn is a very specific niche it's it's a sub nation seo but there is only like a limited number of people uh that exist who are using this particular strategy and we are mostly targeting the agencies because the agencies are the ones who are handling large number of uh their customer base because most of their customers they have no clue the strategies that are involved in in seo so majority of the customers that we have is again like small agencies big agencies and then the individuals who has approximately uh five to ten so what are you spending per month on facebook ads so currently on facebook ads we are spending uh across of uh like 500 approximately for gop even because we have acquired customers and since uh the number of again the number of customers are very limited in this in this particular niche got it yeah so your cac is low but the problem is there's not a lot of those customers exactly but the customers that we acquire uh the cancellation rates are very low oh yeah you said one percent 1.2 percent gross logo turn per month yeah so you said you're spending a lot on kind of ads 500 bucks a month isn't that much considering your revenue where else are you spending money so we are spending a lot of money on seo so currently we are spending approximately around uh five hundred dollars on seo and approximately around fifteen hundred dollars on content that we that we draft every every month so that's where majority of our funds go in and apart from that we also hold a lot of workshops locally so we spend a lot of money on the workshops and we acquired a lot of customers through the workshops as well so where is that 1500 bucks you're spending on content where is that going are you paying someone on fiverr or what no we have an in-house team uh that we have built so we are paying our team itself who are building up the contents got it how much how many team members uh currently we have a team size of 25 25 people and uh are you profitable right now yeah we just weren't profitable that's great have you bootstrapped the company or have you raised yeah we have completely bootstrapped the company that's great so yeah you have to be profitable otherwise you go out of business um good so 25 people um walk me through how do you instruct your content team what to write about okay so whenever we hire any member they go through an exam aggressive or training phase of for 10 days where uh we we have a nicely programmed that we have designed um let's say like the first day they will be they'll be going through the list of articles that i have written and i have drafted and along with a bunch of other articles from some of the top writers they go through it they get the feeling through it and then they start learning a bit about the seo and the importance of on-page seo and from there then they start writing some of the contents so usually it takes them at least a month to get trained completely before they dive into it and they start writing contents got it what is that training course you put them through do you sell that is that public can my listeners go buy it uh not as of now but i'm actually looking to put it up because a couple of my contents that i have written have been have been going like viral and have been shared by like thousands of people especially one of the articles that i wrote on seo copywriting that gives a very sneaky techniques in terms of how people can really rank better and how they can name one techniques sorry name one of the sneaky techniques okay so one of the techniques that uh i call it is uh the expanding technique so what happens is let's say that we arrive we uh let's take an example of of recipe over here right i'm trying to bake a cake so in this case what people would do is they would just write okay just...